Professor Neil Kenny FBA

Sixteenth & seventeenth century literature & thought in Europe, especially France; the role played by various dimensions of language (eg concept-formation; tense-aspect) in the shaping of knowledge & belief.

About this Fellow

My first academic positions were as Frances A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute (1985â€“7), Stipendiary Lecturer at New College Oxford (1987â€“9), and Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London (1989â€“94). I then taught in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge many years (1994â€“2012), before going to Oxford. My main research area is the literature and thought of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. I have long been interested in how different kinds of knowledge were shaped and communicated by literary forms in general and by language in particular. The work on language focused first on â€˜conceptsâ€™ (in particular that of curiosity) and then on â€˜tensesâ€™ (and the attitudes they communicate towards the dead). My current research is rather different: it examines the relationship of literature and learning to social hierarchy in early modern France. It tries to explore connections between literary and intellectual history on the one hand, and social history on the other.

Current post

Past Appointments

About our Fellows

The British Academy is a fellowship of around 1,400 leading national and international academics elected for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences. Each year, the British Academy elects to its Fellowship up to 52 outstanding UK-based scholars who have achieved academic distinction as reflected in scholarly research activity and publication.

On election, all Fellows are assigned to one of 18 broad disciplinary Sections spanning the humanities and social sciences. Fellows may also become members of an additional Section, according to the range of their scholarly expertise.

Publications

(co-ed. with Philip Ford) La Librairie de Montaigne 2012

Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France 2015

An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century French Literature and Thought: Other Times, Other Places London: Duckworth, 2008

The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004

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